


Missing, presumed--

by Blinky the Tree Frog (blinkytreefrog)



Category: The Flash (Comics)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-19
Updated: 2007-12-19
Packaged: 2018-01-25 07:51:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1639907
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blinkytreefrog/pseuds/Blinky%20the%20Tree%20Frog
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's very hot, and there is much confusion.  Warning: spoilers for up to Countdown #20.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Missing, presumed--

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to greenygal for the beta job!
> 
> Written for Person

 

 

It was hot. Really, horribly, uncomfortably hot. James Jesse, the illustrious sometimes-criminal also known as the Trickster, groaned and shifted. What the hell was with all that heat? How was he supposed to sleep when it was so scorching? And the ground was so hard and uncomfortable--wait a second...

He opened his eyes and immediately winced as the sunlight streamed into them. He could see...rocks. Rocks and sand. Rocks and sand that he was lying on, while the sun pounded down on him and it was stiflingly hot. He blinked and connected these facts together. All things considered, it was looking increasingly unlikely that he'd fallen asleep here of his own free will.

He pulled himself into a sitting position and looked around. 'Rocks and sand' seemed to be the theme with the local landscape, which was rather worrying considering that 'pools of water' did not. Definitely a desert then. How the hell had he arrived in a desert? The last thing he remembered was...

Piper. The train. He'd been hurt; his face was _agonising_ , and then Deadshot had twisted the gun around to aim at Piper, and all he could think of was that he _couldn't let that happen_. And then...the pain had been unbelievable. It had also been brief.

"Huh," he said, out loud. His throat was already uncomfortably dry. "This is what, Hell then? I'd hoped for at least Purgatory."

The desert was resolutely silent.

"Fine, be that way. So, my first torture is to experience agonizing dehydration?" He looked around the landscape. No shade either. Rocks and sand. Crap. He pulled himself shakily to his feet. Well, if he was going to be subjected to horrible tortures, he was damned if he was going to just sit around and experience it. "At least I can get some exercise," he told the landscape. "Wouldn't want to be unfit for my next horrible torment, after all." When the landscape still refused to answer, he shrugged and started to walk.

***

Half an hour or so later he was still walking, albeit at a much reduced pace. He was also getting really light-headed, which was odd; he'd rather assumed that the powers that be would want him to experience the whole 'righteous suffering' thing without the benefit of delirium to soften the blow.

 _Ah well_. "I have to say," he addressed a particularly sharp looking rock. "Dehydration's living up to its awful reputation so far. If anyone asks 'is dehydration one of the worst ways to die?', I think I'm definitely going to put it up there." There was a faint cawing overhead and he frowned and glanced up. "Oh good, vultures. Well, it's not really a party unless they show up, is it?" Then he frowned again, as he picked up a faint rumbling sound in the distance. "Thunder? Can't be; that wouldn't make any sense..."

When the noise started to get louder he stopped and listened. Definitely not thunder. It sounded like a car of some sort, but what on earth would that mean? The devil was going to visit him in his jeep? "Could be in trouble if that's the case," he told a passing cloud. After all, he wasn't particularly liked in hell for reasons that were probably entirely his own fault. Still, he stood and waited as the sound turned into a cloud of dust and then the distinct shape of a vehicle.

"...james?!"

He blinked and squinted at the vehicle. Hang on. That voice sounded awfully familiar...

"James!"

He stared at the vehicle, which had now indeed resolved itself into a jeep, or more importantly a jeep with Hartley Rathaway behind the wheel. "Piper?" Piper was the _devil_ now? Man, he was really regretting pissing him off with those jokes.

It was really hot. Possibly he wasn't thinking very clearly.

The jeep screeched to a halt a few yards to the side, and Hartley vaulted out of the driver's seat with an expression of desperate relief. He hit the ground, turned on his heel, rushed at James, and embraced him in a crushing bear hug that was about an inch from snapping several of his ribs like twigs. "James! Omigodyou're alive!"

 _Wait, what_? "Alive?" he croaked, trying desperately to inhale air.

"Oh god, you have no idea. You have no idea how bad it's... They said people were coming back and I grabbed the jeep and just... I remembered where I'd left your... You're not dead! You're back! Oh god, _thankyou_..."

He wheezed. "Need... air..."

"What? Oh!" Piper let go abruptly and jumped back. "I'm sorry!"

James gasped. "That's... okay? I guess? Can I just say that I'm confused and thirsty?"

"I have water in the jeep!" Piper fled to the jeep and began detaching a large container from the outside.

James watched him, dazed. Okay, he _wasn't_ dead? How the hell had that happened, and why on earth was he in the middle of the desert then? Also, and possibly just as important; why was Piper acting so pleased to see him? He tried to remember back to his last memory before the desert had appeared and swallowed up all that was sane in the world. They had been joking with each other, and then Deadshot had... And he'd been worried. _Terrified_ , that Piper would be killed. He blinked. Wait, did they like each other now?

Man, that had really snuck up on him.

"Water!" pronounced Piper. He'd detached the container from the jeep and unsteadily filled a plastic cup, which he was now offering to James. James took it gratefully and proceeded to drain several cups, one after the other, until, feeling a lot better, he poured the last one over his sunburned face.

He was alive. He was at least partially refreshed. He was confused as hell. One out of three of those things annoyed him greatly.

Now for answers.

***

"Hang on, wait, so _what_ were they calling it?"

Piper turned slightly in the driver's seat, keeping one eye on the road. "A reality wave. Well, I mean, they were calling the whole thing the Final Crisis--"James could practically hear the capitals in the phrase--"but they called that the reality wave. All the magic users and the ridiculously powerful people who could alter reality were up there, and when they clashed and the whole thing got linked together it all just...it unleashed this wave over the earth. Things changed all over the place, and all these people came back to life, and I thought...well, I knew where I'd left your, your..." He faltered, with a pained expression on his face.

"My body?" James made a face. "You left me in the middle of the desert? That's... lovely."

He'd expected Piper to be defiant about it, but instead he looked pale and avoided James's eyes. "I... I didn't have any choice. I was too weak to carry you; when I got the cuffs off I just had to leave you there."

"The cuffs..." Several gears clunked in his brain. They were still _attached_ when he... died. Which meant... Damn, he must still be affected by the heat. Doubly so, because he knew he shouldn't ask the question, but it slipped out before he could stop himself. "How long were you carrying me--"

Piper looked firmly straight ahead. "Too long, okay?"

James grimaced. "Right." He'd been wondering why Piper had seemed so... desperate to see him alive. Not that having the company of his wonderful self wasn't enough, but... if he'd been forced to deal with someone's corpse for long enough, he imagined that he'd be pretty relieved to see them alive again as well. No wonder his companion seemed so tense.

His companion. Geez, he'd been out in the desert too long.

"I remembered the place, though."

He'd lost the thread of the conversation. "What?"

"Where you were. Which is good, because otherwise you wouldn't have been able to enjoy your good luck for long."

"This is true." Okay, a change of subject was _really needed_ right now. "Speaking of which, how long are we going to be out here? Even with the hat you managed to scrounge up, I feel like I'm being burnt to a crisp."

Piper threw him a quick smile. "You look like a beetroot with a blond wig on."

"Okay, I'm pretty sure I didn't ask for your opinion there."

"Fair skin's a bitch, isn't it?"

"Are you going to force me to repeat 'are we there yet?' until I get a proper answer?"

Piper grinned at this, and James found himself grinning back. It felt familiar, almost comfortably so.

"Sorry," said Piper. "Uh, this is actually quite a way out. It should be about five hours to a pit stop. I've got spare water and gas though."

James narrowed his eyes. "Five hours... and we've been driving for half an hour, and you would have had to go around a bit to find me because I' d gone walking... exactly how long have you been on the road?"

Piper turned slightly towards him again, looking blank. "I haven't really been keeping track..."

"Oh great!"

He looked slightly defensive. "I'm mostly okay. And it's not like there's much to run into out here..."

"That's not a comfort! Okay, stop. I'm driving for now and you can lie in the back or something."

Piper slowed down and frowned. "Are you sure you're okay for it? I mean, you did just come back from the..."

"I'm fine! I'm very clearly not dead, okay? Look, it's getting late in the afternoon. We don't want to get back when it's too dark."

This time he stopped the jeep. "You've been wandering around in the sun for god knows how long, Tricks. Even if you're not dehydrated you still might be wobbly."

"Not as wobbly as you! I mean, look back at our tire tracks. Does that look straight to you?"

"It looks straight _ish_."

"That's it. Give me the driver's seat."

"I'm not going to let you drive, James. You're clearly not--"

"And you _are_?"

"...maybe."

"That would be the 'glass half empty' maybe, not the 'glass half full', right?"

Piper scowled at him. "I can't believe I just rescued you from being _dead_ , and you're criticising my driving skills."

"I'm criticising your driving skills because I don't want to end up dead again!"

"I'm not letting you drive!"

"I'm not letting _you_ drive."

"Well, what exactly do you suggest we do then?"

***

James sat under the tarp that was currently serving as an improvised tent and scowled. "I'm hot."

Lying next to him in a heap, Piper rolled his eyes. "It'll be night soon. Here, have the towel." He'd dipped said towel in water and had been using it to cool his forehead.

James considered stubbornly rejecting it, but his sunburn was beginning to peel. "Fine. But only because you insist."

"Oh sure. Take this towel or I'll steal your yo-yo collection and tie all of them together with granny knots."

"You fiend!" He dabbed at his forehead. Man, that was going to sting for days. Stupid dying. He sighed. "So..."

"So?"

"What have you been doing while I've been taking my extended vacation?"

Piper closed his eyes. "A lot of things. Running away--"

"Hey, why stop when you've gotten good at it?"

"That's about it, yeah. Fighting."

"Fighting? Oh, the crisis. Pretty much everyone gets sucked in when they roll along."

"Yeah." There was silence for a few seconds.

James bit his lip. "Still, I guess the cuffs were off. That would have been one bright spot, right?"

He jumped when Piper sat up and glared at him from two inches away. "They were off because you were _dead_."

Slightly taken aback, he blinked uncomfortably. Piper was... very close. He felt he should point that out, but he couldn't quite summon up the enthusiasm. "Yeah, I've been getting that. But I wasn't exactly... I mean..."

The glare went up a notch.

He hated being uncomfortable. He needed to say something scathing. Something sarcastic. Something that would make Piper really, incredibly mad at him.

"Sorry?" Something completely opposite to that, in fact. It was possible he needed to lie down for a bit.

The glare softened somewhat, which was lucky because James was fairly certain his retinas couldn't deal with much more. "I would _never_ believe you deserved to _die_." There was something dark buried behind Piper's eyes, and James felt a stab of...something.

He forced himself to look Piper in the eyes. "No. You wouldn't."

Piper looked slightly mollified. "It's getting dark. We're both really tired. We should sleep."

He relaxed a little. _Note to self: do not dwell on own death to person who dragged your body around for god knows how long. They tend to dislike the topic for some reason._ "Right," he said. "Sleep."

Maybe his brain would be working properly when he woke up. Clearly dying had been very unhealthy for him.

***

He awoke suddenly and with little idea of why. Of course, it was rather uncomfortable on the ground and all they had to rest on were a few foam cushions that Piper had dragged out of the jeep. For some reason he didn't think that was the problem, however.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Maybe it was just sleeping so close to Piper. Though, if he was being honest with himself, he was finding it hard to retain any anxiety about that. He'd done it for months on end, after all, and, if he was being _really_ honest with himself, it was almost...

But then, he was never really honest with himself.

He sighed and turned onto his side. He needed to get back to sleep. God knew he was tired, there was no reason--

There was a soft rattling sound across from him, somewhere in the darkness. He froze. _Oh hell_.

Carefully and quietly, he pulled himself up. Light, he needed a light. Cigarette lighter, matches? No, no. Oh, wait. He rummaged around and produced a light-up yo-yo that he'd found on his mysteriously intact costume. It wasn't exactly made for providing a reliable light source, but he was low on supplies. He tapped the toy to set off the light and then peered into the shadows of the tent. Piper was curled up asleep a few feet from him under a blanket, murmuring something indecipherable into the foam pillow. A rattlesnake was slithering out of his blanket and towards said pillow, slowly and deliberately. James's heart stopped.

 _Bad, very bad_.

Okay, he couldn't disturb Piper, because half-awake he'd be likely to disturb the snake and that would be _really_ bad. But Piper was sleeping fitfully, and might accidentally roll onto the snake even without being awake. He needed to get it off. What did snake handlers use? Those sticks with the noose on the end, right? One of those things that he didn't have, and really didn't have time to make.

Kill it? With what? And knowing his luck of late, the snake would survive and Piper would have a lump on the head as well as a snake bite.

Of course, he could grab it by the head. Keep the jaws closed once he had it. Maybe tie them with the yo-yo string and throw it out into the desert. Or just snap its neck. It never looked difficult in westerns.

Westerns. Right. He was going insane. The thing about grabbing it by the head was that yes, Piper was less likely to be bitten, but only in inverse proportion to _his_ chances of being bitten. And really, since when had something horrible happening to himself become the preferable option to something horrible happening to _someone else_?

He stared at the snake. Its tongue flickered out, and it slid up and over Piper's neck, who twitched in his sleep. Someone else? Except it wasn't just someone else. _He saved your life_. But that was only fair, wasn't it? After all, he'd _died_ saving Piper's.

He'd died saving Piper's life. James paused, half-appalled. He'd hardly even thought about it, had barely had a chance to think of the ramifications. _I threw myself in front of a freaking bullet. What the hell was I thinking?_

And then Piper twisted and a hand casually fell down to where the snake was sliding, and James _moved_. Snapped a hand out. Grabbed the head. The snake twisted indignantly in his hands and he held gamely onto the jaws with one hand and used his other to grab the body. It wasn't too big; it was just... _possibly deadly poisonous. Yeah, no problem at all._

Piper blinked sleepily, finally woken by the frantic rattling of the snake's tail. "Trickster? What are you... oh shit."

He gripped tightly and tried to ignore the squirming. "A little _help here_?"

"I've got my pipe! Hang on!" He fumbled under a corner of the tarp.

"Hope you're good at snake charming."

Piper flashed him a grin through the shadows. "Not bad at it." He twisted levers and opened valves along the pipe. "Okay, got it."

The sound was strange and alien, whistling eerily through the tent and into the desert night. The snake immediately stopped struggling, and when Piper nodded James put it down and watched wordlessly as it slithered off tamely towards a pile of rocks in the distance. Piper played on even when it was out of sight, presumably sending out a message to any others in the area that this was a place they wanted to avoid.

James closed his eyes. There had been a musician, back in the circus, eons ago. She played every instrument under the sun, but he'd liked it best when she'd played a set of battered bamboo pan pipes, of all things. Not because he was a particular fan of pan pipe music; it was her _style_. It was weird, and alien and impossible to predict. You never knew which note would follow the last, and yet it wound together in a way that made you accept that it was unquestionably music. It sent a shiver down his spine, not to _know_.

This tune; Piper's snake tune. It ached of her influence, although he knew they could never have met. Alien, unpredictable. And he shivered again.

He started when it stopped, and then carefully composed himself. The past was long gone. Deal with the present.

Piper was looking at him curiously from the shadows at the other side of the tent. "That was only supposed to work on snakes, you know."

He managed to pull up a cynical smile. "Maybe there's something you don't know about me."

The smile was matched. "Well, I did always think you had a forked tongue."

"I suspect that you might not be the only one there."

"You think?" The smile faded. "What exactly just happened?"

 _I embarked on another seemingly selfless act of heroism to save your life for reasons that continue to confuse and disconcert me._ "There was a snake." He shrugged. "I grabbed it and then you woke up."

Piper's voice was laced with an edge. "You grabbed the potentially deadly snake with your _hands_?"

"What else was I supposed to grab it with? My toes? My lips? My--"

"Please stop now."

James sighed. "I didn't have a lot of time to think about it, okay? It was mostly instinct. And it all turned out okay. No problems. We should get back to sleep."

There was a silent pause, as they both completely failed to go back to sleep. The shadows turned to pitch black as clouds drifted across the sky.

Piper's voice floated over from the corner. "Please don't do that again."

"What, tell you to go to sleep?" he replied facetiously.

"Don't. Get. Yourself. Killed." Without facial expressions, the tone was difficult to place. There was anger, certainly. Mixed with...?

He swallowed. This felt surreal. It _was_ surreal, the whole situation. He didn't feel like himself. "And if that means _you_ get killed?"

"Then I'm sure you can live with it."

 _How sure?_ He bit his tongue. "We should get some sleep," he said.

This time there wasn't a reply, and eventually he lay down and closed his eyes resolutely.

***

They started off early in the morning, after packing up the tarp while trading barbs about Trickster's packing style and Piper's lack of breakfast arrangements ("I wasn't actually planning on camping out, you know").

After much needling James managed to pry the wheel from Piper and enjoy his first official drive in many, many months. Even hours later, it was exhilarating. He felt alive. In charge again. Ready to make a decision.

Piper tapped the GPS on the jeep. "We're making good time. Only about 15 minutes until we get to where I got the jeep from. It's a little 'town', and I use generous terms here, that's on a trucking route. Buses go past there each day though; we should be able to buy a trip."

James gave him a look. "Why can't we use the jeep?"

Piper's expression was determined. "Because I rented it and I'm giving it _back_."

"You've got to be kidding me!"

"I rented it from a guy who uses it to check up on an endangered species of lizard once a week! He's probably already wondering where I am. We're not stealing the damn jeep, James!"

"But I like the jeep! It's cool and rugged and I get to drive it!"

"I'm going on the bus. You are also going on the bus." He hesitated. "And I suppose after that we go our own way."

James scowled. "See, if we kept the jeep we wouldn't _have_ to go our own way. Are you going to let a little vehicle larceny get between us, Piper?"

"Yeah, well that's not..." Piper paused. "Hang on, what?"

"Fine! I'll use the bus. Just don't expect the rest of the passengers to appreciate it. I think I'm giving you fair warning here..."

"I...yes. Thanks. What did you say before about...?"

James leaned one hand on the wheel and looked casually over at Piper. "Well come on, we work well together. Are you that dead set on parting ways?"

Piper stared at him. James gazed innocently back.

Then Piper narrowed his eyes, a faint smile on his face. "I'd ask you to tone down the vehicle larceny, or it _will_ come between us."

"What about Porsches? Guy can afford a Porsche, he can afford to lose it."

Piper nodded thoughtfully. "Well, we'll take it on a case by case basis, okay?"

"I suppose I can live with that. Also? I'm gonna need my stuff. I've got back-up stashes but we'll need to actually get to one..."

Piper nodded again. "I've got some of your stuff stored anyway."

"Shoes?"

He grinned and grabbed a water canteen to sip at. "Possibly."

"Okay, so what else... hey, are we still wanted for the Flash thing, or is he alive again too?"

Piper paused mid-sip. "I... Actually I'm not sure. Man, we've got to get a paper."

"Sounds like a plan. Shoes, Porsche, paper... Oh, let's decide where we're going next and book a decent hotel room, okay? It may be risky but I have several months of grime to wash off of myself and I'm a little afraid of what might have built up in those hard-to-reach areas."

"You're disgusting. Hilton or the Ritz?"

"I can never decide. You do it. Now what...oh yeah. Make sure you book a king size bed. And I hope you don't steal the sheets; I hate that."

Piper choked.

James grinned and thumped him on the back with one hand. "You okay there?"

"You... I thought you..."

And the Trickster smiled.

"Yeah," he said. "I think this is the start of a beautiful relationship."

 


End file.
